Health – Performance – Transformation

Main menu

Post navigation

The Dangers of Stress Unleashed

Let me make this clear from day one—unmanaged day to-day stress is the worst thing that can happen to your health. It is one of the largest & most difficult stumbling blocks to get over. Stress is a moment-by-moment part of modern day life.

For many entrepreneurs, stress is a way of life. It becomes a habit that won’t go away – and the world we live in isn’t helping; We experience an estimated one hundred times greater stress level than our grandparents.

There are two distinctions to make about stress:

Positive Stress.

Some stress brings about positive experiences. For example, studies show that people who are happy with their stressful jobs have similar brain activity to people ten years younger.

Dr. Lachman is one of the principal investigators for what could be considered the Manhattan Project of middle age, an enormous study titled Midlife in the United States, or Midus. Everyone in the study who regularly did more to challenge their brains — reading, writing, attending lectures or completing word puzzles — did better on fluid intelligence tests than their counterparts who did less. And those with the fewest years of schooling showed the largest benefits.

Middle-age subjects who had left school early but began working on keeping their minds sharp had substantially better memory & faster calculating skills than those who did not. They responded as well as people up to 10 years younger. In fact, their scores were comparable to college graduates.

Negative Stress.

This type of stress usually comes from not being in control of an outcome. When you try your best to have a situation work out in your favor, but it doesn’t, the end result is stress, leading to more stress. There are many other inlets of stress in to your body on a day-to-day basis. Noise, environmental, quality of food (or lack of), emotional, relationship, financial, workload… the list goes on. Stress is unavoidable.

There are of course ways to manage this negative stress, which I go into detail in my book HealthWealth

It’s helpful to remember that checking for danger is a stress response. It may be human nature to think of safety & survival often, but the chances of you being attacked by a lion walking down Oxford Street or Rodeo Drive are zero.

Your body overreacts to any stress response. You can reduce your stress levels when you are clear on three criteria:

1) Know where you are right now, physically & mentally.

2) Take responsibility for where you are going from this point.

3) Have a plan of how to get to where you want to go.

The Bottom Line…

Once you have these three criteria handled you will reduce your day-to-day anxiety & stress levels. It is subtle but useful.